Bills second-round draft pick Keon Coleman said quarterback Josh Allen texted him last Friday to say, “You’re the guy that I want.”
As it turns out, Allen had a good idea of what was coming.
Buffalo had traded down to No. 33 overall — the first pick of Day 2 — and General Manager Brandon Beane was prepared to draft Coleman. Allen had been somewhat involved in the draft process to that point, reaching out to Beane on several occasions.
“Josh is crazy about the draft process. He loves it,” Beane said in an interview with SiriusXM NFL Radio. “If I get a call from Josh in the offseason, it’s usually him seeing somebody on a highlight, running into somebody, throwing with somebody — just something to ask me what I think about this guy. He called me at the Senior Bowl [to ask] what do I think about a couple of guys there. So he loves it.
“He’s been in the building the last couple of weeks now that the offseason program’s started. So we did give him some guys, we said, ‘Hey, sit back with the coaches, y’all watch them together and talk about how you’d use them. I’d like to hear what you see.’ And he liked a lot of the guys, he really did. But Keon was one — I know he liked him a lot, too. And Josh and I didn’t speak Thursday, really. Maybe he stopped by that morning. But that next day, Friday morning, he FaceTimed me — actually I was still at home before I headed in here. And he was like, ‘What are you thinking?’ And I said, ‘Well, barring somebody blowing me away, I’m going to take Keon.’ And he was pretty pumped.”
So pumped that Allen let Coleman know that he was the receiver the quarterback wanted at the top of the second round.